- This event has passed.
Poetry book group – Independent Bookshop Week
20 June at 18:30 - 19:45
For Independent Bookshop Week, we have partnered with publisher And Other Stories.
Poetry book club! Come along to discuss poetry collection, Pitch & Glint by Lutz Seiler, translated by Stefan Tobler. This is a particularly special occasion as publisher and translator Stefan will be joining us for the discussion.
On its original publication in 2000, Pitch & Glint was widely hailed as a landmark in German poetry. Rooted in Seiler’s childhood home, an East German village brutally undermined by Soviet Russian uranium extraction, these propulsive poems are highly personal, porous, twisting, cadenced, cryptic and earthy, traversing the rural sidelines of European history with undeniable evocative force. The frailty of bodies, a nearness to materials and manual work, the unknowability of our parents’ suffering, and ultimately the loss of childhood innocence, all loom large in poems where sound comes first.
As Seiler says in an essay, ‘You recognise the song by its sound. The sound forms in the instrument we ourselves have become over time. Before every poem comes the story that we have lived. The poem catches the sound of it. Rather than narrating the story, it narrates its sound.’
We’ll meet at 6.30 in the upstairs private room of The Albion pub. (Note the venue change for this one – we are meeting at The Albion.)
To sign up, pop in and buy a copy of Pitch & Glint or let us know if you need this delivered to you. If you already have a copy, we just ask that you buy a different book published by And Other Stories… how about some poetry featuring an angel rescuing an accountant from hell?
From July, we plan to keep running a poetry group. Do let us know if you are interested.